Paul Karrer: 10 years of No Child Left Behind

It is the 10-year anniversary of No Child Left Behind. I’m reminded of a Gettysburg battle photo — those poor corpses on the field could be today’s teachers and students. The education reformers of our day have caused the same carnage, waste and fraud.

The publicly stated goal of NCLB was to diminish the education gap between children of color, and the higher performance of Anglo and Asian children. But the private mission was to destroy teachers’ unions, provide a financial feed trough sucking on the public sector, and privatize with charter schools that which is public. The main conduit of this was through testing.

Teachers and schools reacted by teaching to the test. Basically any scores that went up should be suspect because schools dropped courses to teach only math and reading. And teachers got to practice test-taking. The final outcome is kids in schools of poverty are taught a poverty of subjects imposed on them by NCLB and RTTT. (Obama’s Race to The Top). The so-called testing achievement gap between high performing Anglos and low performing children of poverty has diminished marginally on paper. But the learning and education chasm has deepened. Kids in high wealth areas get: band, civics, Japanese, Chinese, even Latin. Children of poverty get math and reading. Bottom line — NCLB has worsened education.

Teachers did not do this. Teachers do not determine what current curriculums or magic reform-flavored silver bullet we must foist on our kids. Presidents, governors, and federal education czars have usurped that role.

Why is it kids in poor areas do wretchedly and kids in wealthy areas do well? It is not the schools, nor the curriculum. It is raw poverty.

A ground-breaking study called ACES (Adversity Childhood Experience Study) shows the influence of stress on children. In the ACE (Kaiser Permanente /CDC) Study, more than 17,000 Health Maintenance Organization members provided information about their childhood experience of abuse, neglect, and family dysfunction.

“Children with toxic stress respond to the world as a place of constant danger,” the study found. “With their brains overloaded with stress hormones and unable to function appropriately, they can’t focus on learning.”

The latest NCLB bamboozle requires districts to set aside 20 percent of their Title I funds to provide School Choice transportation or SES (Schools Education Supplement) services for designated students. Parents have an option of requesting to transfer their student to a non-PI school with transportation provided by the district or requesting SES. Teachers can get $70 an hour to do after-school tutoring under this program. This $70 comes out of our local district budget. Approved tutorial companies have the contract for this and they bill the district even more on top of the $70 per hour per teacher.

In the past, teachers volunteered to do this after school for free or for a paltry portion of $70. This is a federally imposed obscenity and it merely provides cash for outside providers. This is criminal and typifies the private business model of profiteering in the public business of education lauded by Arnie Duncan, President Obama, and Michelle Rhee.

Our nation’s students do not need to have money wasted on testing. We need to have money in the classrooms. In my school, we do not have enough paper to make copies. Nurses, psychologists and counselors are nowhere to be seen. But the police do show up often, even in our elementary schools. I surveyed my own troubled class of fifth-graders and 14 out of 32 of them have a family member who was shot.

And now apparently it is teachers’ job to give up our lives, too. We are willing.

President Obama’s RTTT sold out children, parents and schools when he assimilated the business model.

This is all just so wrong. What can people do? Inform parents, guardians, aunts and uncles that children can OPT out of testing. We started a historic boycott against injustice before in Salinas Valley and we won.

Schools and districts across the country are boycotting testing, add your child’s name. Call your school and opt out. Don’t let them talk you out of it either. Boycott the testing.